The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life (20 page)

Years later Sister Dulce was working in a California mission when she claimed to have had a vision while in prayer. During the mystical experience God imparted a healing gift through her hands—something she said she discovered only after laying them on a woman dying of pancreatic cancer, and finding that she could absorb some of the woman’s pain into her hands.

In 2000 Sister Dulce found her way to Baton Rouge in response to what she described as a command from “Papa,” the name she used for God. She began visiting with the sick and praying with them. Word spread fast around town that the chubby little Latina nun with the cheerful personality was a vessel of God’s healing mercies. Within a decade she and her supporters opened the Cypress Springs Mercedarian Prayer Center, a chapel, convent, and retreat house in a wooded south Baton Rouge enclave.

The nun believes that God sometimes heals through her touch. Often the healing is not physical, but a spiritual and emotional closure that allows the terminally ill to reconcile themselves to their condition and die in peace.

Why would my Methodist sister seek out a Catholic faith healer if she had accepted her fate? The answer is that Ruthie was of two minds about her cancer: if God meant for her to die, then she would accept that. But she was not convinced that this was God’s will. Perhaps this was a test of faith, and He would restore her, if she prayed, and if she
believed. That was her hope, anyway—a hope that led her to Sister Dulce’s prayer center early in her cancer fight. In the nun’s office that spring day Sister Dulce and Ruthie had a general conversation about her medical condition. Then Sister asked Ruthie to step closer.

She put her hands on Ruthie’s torso, on top of her clothes. The nun almost gasped. “Oh, child,” she said, “You are so sick.” Ruthie stood expressionless, blinking. Sister Dulce held Ruthie’s hands, and said she was going to talk to Papa. She added that she would walk this road by Ruthie’s side, if it took her through to healing, or if it ended in death.

Tears spilled over Ruthie’s cheekbones as the little nun spoke, but she left the prayer center feeling more confident about the road ahead.

This vulnerable Ruthie—the cancer sufferer who wept, who feared, who anguished—was not the Ruthie nearly everyone else saw. Only Mike and Abby saw her in these moments of doubt and pain. To her children, her parents, her friends, and her community, Ruthie was a tower of faith and a beacon of hope.

After Ruthie’s treatment started Tim Lindsey moved into a medical support role in Ruthie’s life. He didn’t see her as often in his office, but he did see her around town. At birthday parties, ball games, parades, school events, and anything her girls were involved in, Ruthie was there with a smile on her face. The townspeople were amazed by the fight she had in her. “Her cancer is really bad, right, doc?” a patient asked Tim. “But she came to my kid’s birthday party anyway.”

“I saw her at the football game the other night,” another one said. “It was raining and everything, but she didn’t miss it.”

At one point in her struggle, Tim could see how much pain she was in, and confronted her with some difficult questions.

“Have you thought about whether or not there’s a time when we need to call hospice, when you’re done with this treatment?” he asked. “You have to let me know, because I’ll support you a hundred percent. How are you dealing with this? Do you need anything for your emotions? How are you doing all this?”

She had not thought about hospice care. She had not seriously considered that she might not survive.

“Tim, if I think about truly how sick I am, it will overwhelm me,” she said. “I have to focus on what I have, what I’ve been given. Otherwise, I’m not going to be able to make it.”

The way Ruthie was, if she believed she was fine, and acted like she was fine, then she would be fine.

Tim’s wife, Laura, heard the same thing from Ruthie. In the summer of 2011 Laura was picking up her daughter at cheerleader camp when she saw Mam, who told her that Ruthie was at the hospital having X-rays. She had fallen the night before and hurt her ribs. Ruthie eventually showed up at the camp and told Laura nothing was broken, but she was in a lot of pain.

After the program ended Laura’s friend Betsy approached them and asked Ruthie how she was doing.

“I’m fine, I’m good,” Ruthie said. You could believe that, too, because she didn’t say these assuring things in a nervous, defensive voice, but rather in her customary calming cadence.

Laura wasn’t fooled. She looked at Betsy and said jokingly, “Ruthie’s lying to you. She hurts a lot.”

“No, I
am
okay,” Ruthie insisted. “This is the deal: if I tell myself I’m okay, I’m okay. But if I tell myself I’m not okay, I’ll crawl in a hole and I’ll never come out of it.”

That same summer Ruthie and Abby went for a drive into Mississippi to shop for antiques. On the way home they stopped at a café for lunch. Abby had been grappling with anger at God for what had happened to Ruthie, and trying to understand Ruthie’s peacefulness in the face of her pain and suffering.

“Ruthie, do you think about tomorrow?” Abby asked. “Do you think about the future? Do you plan?”

“I don’t think past today,” Ruthie replied.

“Do you make yourself not do that? Because if I were in your
shoes, I would have to force myself to stop thinking about tomorrow. Don’t you?”

“No, I just don’t.”

As crazy as it sounded Abby respected Ruthie’s denial as a commonsense strategy to help her endure the seemingly unendurable. Ruthie had told Dr. Miletello to do whatever he thought best and placed her trust, and her life, in his hands, and in God’s. Besides Abby knew, if Ruthie did not, that her best friend faced very long odds with this cancer. If choosing not to look at the monster under the bed helped Ruthie sleep better on the nights she had left on this earth, well, who was Abby to question that?

Though I didn’t dare say so, there were times when I wondered whether what looked like bravery was in fact a form of cowardice in the face of the awful truth about her condition. It didn’t make sense to me. Everybody could see how serene, how happy, and how joyful Ruthie was, despite suffering terribly. But did this count as courage if she achieved that state of equilibrium by refusing to know the truth?

I was scared to ask her, afraid that I would plant doubt in her mind, doubt that would act as a gust of wind that would topple her from the high wire she was walking. And for what? Nothing I could say to Ruthie would prolong her life, or make her better able to enjoy whatever time she had left. Her doctors were throwing everything medical science had at her. All the extra information could only sap her will to resist. The truth—the whole truth, that is—would not set her free, but would make her captive to anxiety, and tempt her to despair. This was not a classroom exercise in faith versus doubt. This was not an argument at a college cafeteria table between philosophy students who had the leisure to speculate on ultimate questions. This was reality. This was a woman who was waging a desperate guerrilla war for her life. What good would it do her to hear me say that the forces of death arrayed against her were overwhelming?

And yet there was no getting around Ruthie’s cognitive
dissonance—that is, the difficulty in squaring her confident faith in God’s providence with her white-knuckled refusal to admit any facts that stood to undermine her hope. I finally reconciled it, at least in my mind, by considering two things. First, while my nature was contemplative, Ruthie’s was active. Second, that nature served her moral commitment to duty, even to the point of self-sacrifice—the bedrock of Ruthie’s character.

Survival for the sake of Mike and the kids became the absolute focus of her life. It had always been hard to convince Ruthie to do things for herself, but if she came to believe it was for the sake of others, there was nothing she wouldn’t attempt. Ruthie found the thought that she wouldn’t be around to care for her family intolerable. By force of will she pushed aside anything that she reckoned would compromise her commitment to them. Contemplating the philosophical aspects of her situation was an indulgence she could not afford.

There was no real contradiction between believing that her fate was ultimately in God’s hands, but also doing all that she could to cooperate with His will—which she believed could and indeed would include a complete physical healing. Miracles, after all, do happen. If there was a miracle in store for her, Ruthie believed she had to be open to receiving it, or it might pass her by.

Still I worried about the effect of Ruthie’s strategy on her children. She never leveled with them about her condition, never convened a family discussion to talk about the possibility that she might not survive. “I’ll never lie to you,” she told the girls, and she made good on that promise. But she didn’t tell them that there was a chance cancer could win, and that they should prepare for that possibility.

Here too, Ruthie understood her children well. She grasped that if the girls admitted to themselves that their mother might die, they would fall apart. Whatever time Ruthie had left would be spent not living with joy and light, but rather trying to hold her frightened, shattered children together as they waited for the end. So she told her girls
when the news from the doctor was good, and she told them when it was bad, but she kept the discussion vague and general. “Girls, I’ll answer any questions you have,” she said. They never had any questions. They didn’t really want to know.

It was easy for Claire and Rebekah, who were still young, to accept on faith that there would be a happy ending to their mother’s story. As old as they were at the time—Claire was eleven, Rebekah, eight—they still possessed a remarkable capacity for childlike belief. Besides their mother had raised them to be reticent about asking questions. It was much more difficult for Hannah, who was not only temperamentally more inquisitive than her sisters, but also had turned seventeen only three months after her mother’s diagnosis.

Hannah had always played the part of the Golden Girl. Straight A’s. Involved in every club, academic and social. Cheerleader. Churchgoer. Obedient. And then, after doing everything right, she woke up to find that her mother had lung cancer. She rebelled. She stayed out of the house as much as she could, because that’s where the cancer was. When nobody was around Hannah threw things, and tore her clothes. Sometimes she would climb aboard the four-wheeler, motor to Paw’s pond, and, far from anyone’s ears, scream as loud as she could. She wanted to yell at her mother, too. In her heart she screamed, “Stop having cancer! Be our mama again!”

Some of this was no doubt standard teenage rebellion. Even before Ruthie got sick, she and Hannah fought. Hannah was tired of living in that boring old town, and couldn’t understand why her mother was so happy there. Nothing ever happened, nothing ever changed, and nobody ever talked about anything other than what other people were up to. As Hannah saw it, her mother had settled; that was something she had no intention of doing. She didn’t know what she wanted out of life, but Hannah was certain she wasn’t going to find it in St. Francisville—and she thought less of her mother for her contentment with such a dull way of life.

Ruthie was not prepared for this, and came down hard on her daughter. In fairness to Ruthie, Hannah
was
behaving selfishly, and had been since before the cancer. And she had resolved that her mother would never understand her, so she had stopped trying to explain herself, leaving Ruthie in a difficult position. Nevertheless Mam and Paw warned Ruthie to be patient, not to make the same mistakes as Paw had done with me. Ruthie was immune to their advice, or so it seemed to them. Nobody knew. Ruthie kept these things within her own family.

I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point well before Ruthie got sick, I began to sense a yearning in Hannah for something she couldn’t define, but that was beyond her experience in West Feliciana. I knew that she was going to face a personal crisis over this issue before she did; I had been there myself, and knew how it would be for a teenager like her in a family like ours. Over the years my bond with Hannah thickened as I saw her sensibilities and eccentricities resemble my own as a child. Now, having noticed that she was a dedicated reader, I thought about what escapist literature appealed to me at her age, when I was bored, sullen, and eager to leave. That’s why I sent Hannah a copy of
A Moveable Feast
, Ernest Hemingway’s memoir of his years in 1920s Paris.

It was just the thing. After reading the book, and rereading it, Hannah, at fifteen and sixteen, would lie in bed at night, imagining herself in Paris, sitting in a café all day, talking to strangers, adoring beauty, cultivating passion, being cosmopolitan. This is how my niece became a nascent Francophile, something she revealed to me that first cancer summer, as she planned to fly to Philadelphia to visit us. Julie and I offered to take her anywhere she wanted to have a big dinner.

She chose Parc, an upscale French brasserie on Rittenhouse Square in downtown Philadelphia. Reading about it online Parc struck her as the Frenchiest place in town, the kind of restaurant that would provide a real Boulevard Saint-Germain thrill. As soon as the three of us stepped inside the restaurant that warm Philly evening, I knew she
was right. The gleaming zinc bar, the leather banquettes, the tile work, the sepia walls, waiters in white aprons striding by bearing trays laden with crocks of onion soup smothered in gooey Gruyère. Hannah had chosen well: this was as close to Paris as you were going to get this side of the Atlantic. In a giddy fugue she had that night her first taste of champagne, her first raw oysters, her first boeuf bourguignon. Hannah’s conversation bubbled with enthusiasm about why beauty is so important in life, and how she wanted to fall in love with a man who could appreciate a restaurant like this one.

“Just make sure he’s a man who will be just as comfortable at Mam and Paw’s table in Starhill as he is at this one,” Julie cautioned. Exactly right, I thought.

Late in the evening Hannah swooned, “Aaaaah, this is like a movie. This is how I want to live my life.”